The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"

"The Winter of Listening"

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."

- David Whyte,

"The House of Belonging"

Chet Raymo, "The Dot and the Abyss"

Click image for larger size.

"The Dot and the Abyss"

by Chet Raymo

"Let's take a stroll around the neighborhood. Nearby. Not very far. Let's say 20 light-years from the Sun. A typical neighborhood, for our neck of the galaxy. About a hundred stars. If we travel to the nearest one on, say, a Voyager spacecraft, it will take us upwards of thirty thousand years to get there. So our neighborhood amble will take a while.

First we'll pop in on Alpha Centauri and its two companions. Alpha is a twin of our Sun, a yellow star. In our 20-light-year neighborhood there are half-a-dozen Sunlike stars. Not many stars are bigger or brighter. Sirius, Altair, Procyon. Nothing really hot and bright like Rigel in Orion, and no red giants. All things considered, our Sun is one of the big shots on the block. A dozen or so orange stars, somewhat cooler and less bright than the Sun. A passel of red dwarfs. And a handful of white dwarfs make up the mix. About a hundred in all.

Now let's put the neighborhood in perspective. Imagine the 20-light-year-radius sphere with its hundred stars is the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Then the Milky Way Galaxy would be about the size of your desktop, a great wheeling whirl of stars with our neighborhood dot about two-thirds of the way out from the center.

Click image for larger size.

The next spiral galaxy? Andromeda? Another circular tabletop of a hundred billion stars at the other end of the house. How many galaxies? Well, tens of billions that we can potentially see with current technology, spread out around us in every direction for hundreds of miles. And our sweet little Sun and its one hundred neighboring stars are in this period.

We know all of this. But there is a sense in which we don't know it. Psychologically we still live in the cosmic egg universe of Dante, our cozy planet with the Empyrean just up there above the clouds. We have lived through the most breathtaking transformation of human knowledge and we haven't begun to grasp what it means. It’s as if the transformation never happened. We know and we don't know. Maybe we don't want to know."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

South Jordan, Utah, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

by Bruce Krasting

"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."

- http://www.zerohedge.com/

"What Can We Know?"

"What can we know? What are we all? 

Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, 

with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Jim Kunstler, "The Perfect Storm Is Bearing Down"

"The Perfect Storm Is Bearing Down"

by Jim Kunstler

"Time, the saying goes, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. So now, maybe, we’re at the event horizon where nature is suspended because everything seems to be happening at once. The weeks ahead could determine whether we are a coherent society that can function on the basis of a firm consensual reality or just a collection of battling narratives designed to conceal anything that quacks like truth, all veering toward failure.

This is a very nervous country, and for a good reason. The collective sense of reality has commenced a momentous shift, the compass is spinning wildly, things are shaking loose in the national brain-pan, the gaslight has lost its sheen and the once-solid narrative is turning to vapor, starting with the unspooling riddles of COVID-19. The COVID-19 engineered bioweapon is being used internationally to suppress formerly free citizens of formerly democratic republics. It becomes more obvious each day that everything connected to this extravaganza is other than it appears to be.

The numbers don’t add up, starting with the fact that when you combine the official registered COVID cases (people with acquired natural immunity) with the people who already had some kind of immunity from previous lifelong coronavirus encounters with the number of people vaccinated, you have a population supposedly way beyond herd immunity. Who’s getting sick now? Mostly people who are all vaxxed up.

A Ticking Time Bomb? Contrary to the behavior and statements of public health officials and politicians, the news is out that the spike proteins produced by the vax’s mRNA genetic reprogramming are toxic agents that create disorder in the major organs and blood vessels.

Chiefly, the vaccine is not a vaccine, and it will probably end up killing more people than the COVID-19 disease and its variants. A lot of those deaths will be caused in the months ahead by damage to people’s hearts and other organs from these spike proteins. The reported official numbers are all lies of one kind or another, issued by agencies primarily concerned not with public health but with covering asses at the highest level, so do not trust them. If you haven’t had a vax shot, better seriously consider steering clear of your government’s desperate attempts to get the job done.

The news is also out, despite strenuous suppression, that early treatment of COVID-19 with a kit of cheap drugs defeats the disease. People must conclude that there is a malevolent purpose behind the suppression of early treatment. They may also conclude that the vaxes are poison.

Mandating the vaxes was an easily predicted tactical blunder. Did “Joe Biden” and company not realize that threatening the livelihoods of 100 million people might generate a whole lot of anger and resentment? Especially since those people have good reasons to believe the vax is harmful to them?

Is Fauci Desperate or Crazy? Last week, an FDA advisory panel ruled against distributing mRNA booster shots among the general population over age 16 - with exceptions for the vaguely defined “high risk” individuals over 65. In spite of that, COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci keeps pushing for boosters. On Sunday, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We’re waiting for data on natural immunity. We know that if you have natural immunity and also get the shot, immunity dramatically increases.”

Oh, really? Even though it’s known for sure (i.e., established in science) that natural immunity is way more potent, comprehensive and permanent than anything the vaccine pretends to offer, while it is becoming clear that the vaxes disable people’s immune systems - hence, the impressive number of the vaxxed getting sick?

Is Dr. Fauci desperate or just plain crazy? The question may be moot, because it looks like he’s out of running room on his whole crusade, COVID-19, vaxes, authoritative nonsense and all. The story has fallen apart. t looks an awful lot like the government is trying to harm people healthwise while it destroys jobs and small business and ruins households financially, and that counterstory is spreading faster now than COVID-19. Or maybe they’re just idiots. Who knows?

It’s fair to ask whether all that has destroyed the legitimacy of the people in charge - but that is only one of several issues converging to detonate the people’s faith in their own government.

Bad News for Biden: Biden had a bad week on the family grift front as the story broke, first on Politico and then elsewhere like a brushfire, that the trove of incriminating memoranda on Hunter Biden’s laptop was for-real and that the concerted effort to hide all that muck from the voters during last year’s election campaign was a completely dishonest operation. Add up all the memos and emails on Hunter’s hard drive and you have a pretty clear digital trail of a major racketeering operation that can no longer be denied. So will Merrick Garland’s DOJ keep ignoring it?

Meanwhile, the crisis on the U.S./Mexican border has suddenly gotten so bad that even the mainstream media had to report on it. The shantytown of Haitians and other foreign nationals moiling under the freeway bridge at Del Rio, Texas, grew by thousands each day, to around 15,000 as of Sunday.

Joe Biden owns the open border, and everybody knows it, and the actual citizens of the USA are getting alarmed and sore about it. On Sunday night, the White House announced “plans” to fly at least 10,000 of the Haitians to Haiti, despite the fact that most of them had been living in Brazil, Chile and other nations before entering the USA. Haiti, of course, is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and only recently suffered a massive earthquake, not to mention the assassination in July of its president. Does this airlift sound like a plan?

Maybe check the “No” box on that. U.S. citizens might have also registered that “Joe B.” unloaded 37,000 Afghanis in five states since we bailed on that country Aug. 31, and plans to bring in almost 100,000 by the end of 2022 (BBC).

All this at a time when millions of Americans have lost their businesses and lost their jobs and are under threat of losing more jobs for not getting vaxxed. Wait, there’s more…

Events Are Converging: Think this is enough to cause a national attitude adjustment? China’s financial system has tripped into a liquidity crisis with the insolvency of its colossal Evergrande real estate Ponzi. Coincidentally - and on rather a separate track - we have China’s latest export to the advanced economies of the world: The meltdown of its bond market as signified in the wreck of super-gigantic real estate conglomerate Evergrande. Behold the broken daisy-chain of obligations stretching to the furthest reaches of global finance and the deleterious effect of that on capital markets everywhere to follow.

The central banks are pulling out the last stops now to prevent a general meltdown of hallucinated “wealth” around the world, and you can probably measure the success of that last-ditch effort in days as we enter the cursed month of October, when skeletons dance on the graves of lost fortunes.

The stage managers behind “Joe Biden” look forward to that as they would to so many stakes driven through their degenerate hearts. Isn’t this a great time for a global financial crisis? Maybe you’re saying, no, not so much. That’d probably be a good call.

Events are converging. Everything is happening at once. Narratives are in collapse. Governments may soon commence to fall. Food and critical supplies of parts for things needed to run advanced societies are up next. What will you decide to do about yourself, your community and your country?"

- dailyreckoning.com

"The Mainstream Media Is Using Terms Like 'Worsening' And 'Foreseeable Future' To Describe The Shortages"

"The Mainstream Media Is Using Terms Like

 'Worsening' And 'Foreseeable Future' To Describe The Shortages"

by Michael Snyder

"Yes, these shortages are really happening, and now the mainstream media is warning us to brace ourselves because they are going to get even worse. After the article that I posted yesterday, emails came pouring in from people all around the country. There were a few that didn’t want to believe that things are as bad as I was saying, but there were lots of other emails that confirmed that conditions are at least as bad as I described. In fact, there was one extremely alarming email from someone that works in the supermarket industry that I hope to share with all of you in the coming days once I get permission to do so.

For most of us, we have lived our entire lives without ever having to be concerned about shortages. In fact, just a few years ago it would have seemed crazy to suggest that we were on the verge of widespread shortages here in the United States. But now here we are, and we are being told that the shortages are going to continue to intensify. In fact, the Washington Post is telling us that the global chip shortage is showing signs of “worsening”…

"The global semiconductor shortage that has paralyzed automakers for nearly a year shows signs of worsening, as new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production. A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips."

That is really bad news, because the chip shortage is affecting thousands of other industries. For example, global vehicle production is way down due to the chip crisis, and this has resulted in a growing shortage of new vehicles on dealer lots all over the nation…"The chip famine is starving the global auto industry and putting car buyers on a strict diet. So far this year, seven million cars that were supposed to be produced haven’t been, according to IHS Markit data. Auto companies are shutting down production lines for weeks at a time and furloughing employees as a result of the chip shortage. Toyota has slashed its production 40% in September."

All this is hitting consumers. Car dealers’ lots across the U.S. are sparse. The inventory of new cars in the U.S. is only about 30% of pre-pandemic levels, and buyers snap up used cars as soon as they find them.

Of course we aren’t facing a shortage of everything. There are certain products that are still quite plentiful. And there are some areas that are being affected a lot more than others. So what you are seeing in your neck of the woods may differ from what other people are experiencing. But there are some shortages that are definitely being felt all over the country.

When the COVID pandemic first started to sweep across the U.S. last year, it sparked a huge run on toilet paper, and now it is starting to happen again…"Costco Wholesale is having trouble fulfilling toilet paper orders. The membership-only warehouse retail chain is issuing a warning to customers that have purchased the common household item online, saying they may face delays in receiving their orders."

Unfortunately, this could potentially be just the beginning. According to one expert that was interviewed by Fox Business, there will soon be another “massive shortage” of toilet paper… "The U.S. will experience another “massive shortage” of toilet paper soon as supply chains continue to suffer due to pandemic-related issues, one retail expert warned. “Product shortages as bad as they were in the beginning of COVID are coming back,” Burt Flickinger said on FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria.”

Did you ever imagine that we would be talking about such a thing in late 2021? A lot of optimists out there had assumed that the economy would be “booming” by now. But instead, the machinery of our economy has gotten gummed up really badly. At this point, there is even a growing shortage of alcoholic beverages… "The Pennsylvania state board in charge of consumer liquor sales announced last week that it was limiting customers to two bottles of certain alcoholic beverages per day. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board said the purchase limit on select items — including Hennessy Cognac, Buffalo Trace bourbon and Patrón tequila — will be in place for the “foreseeable future.” Liquor store customers in North Carolina are encountering “out of stock” signs instead of their favorite spirits, local TV station WTVD reported, amid an ongoing supply shortage there, too.

Of course so many of these problems could be solved if we simply had enough workers. As I discussed the other day, we are in the midst of the worst labor shortage that we have ever experienced. All over the nation critical labor shortages are crippling the ability of organizations to get things done, and now Joe Biden’s new mandates threaten to make things a lot worse.

If you can believe it, even NPR is running stories about how Biden’s mandates are going to cause gigantic headaches for employers… “I can’t afford to lose anyone,” says Ted LeNeave, CEO of Accura HealthCare, which operates 34 nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. Because of staffing shortages, they’ve had to limit admissions, turning down patients coming from hospitals.

With about 1,000 of his employees - 38% of his workforce - unvaccinated, LeNeave is calling on the federal government to provide a testing option for health care workers. Sadly, if Biden does not change his approach, that one company alone will have to let about a thousand workers go… “I just don’t see how I can lay off a thousand people,” says LeNeave. “I’d have no one to take care of the patients, and there’s nowhere to send the patients.”

Biden’s mandates should start going into effect around the end of the year, and that could represent a real turning point for the economy. We are moving into such troubled times, but most people desperately want to believe that better times are just around the corner.

Through good times and bad, the U.S. economy has always been highly resilient, and most of us would like to assume that it will continue to be highly resilient. But the truth is that things are starting to break down on a very basic level, and the outlook as we head toward the end of the year is not good at all."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

"The Blind Indifference..."

Must Watch! “Full Blown Property Crisis Coming; Grocery Store Shock”

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, PM 9/24/21:

“Full Blown Property Crisis Coming; 

Grocery Store Shock”

○

“This day of reckoning is going to be so lethal… 

it’s going to be so catastrophic…” 

$60 trillion in real estate; $2.4 QUADRILLION in derivatives.

How much of an effect will this have on the entire global economy and America?

A reasonably accurate video metaphor for where we are now, 

and what’s coming…

Full screen recommended.

This is no joke, folks. God help us…

"Rental Market Apocalypse Pushes 4 Million Americans To Face Foreclosures And Evictions As Prices Soar"

Full screen recommended.

"Rental Market Apocalypse Pushes 4 Million Americans 

To Face Foreclosures And Evictions As Prices Soar"

by Epic Economist

"The United States is facing a painful housing crisis. While home prices soared to unprecedented levels, having surged by roughly 20 percent compared to a year ago, those who decided to turn to rent instead are witnessing similarly shocking increases. According to Realtor.com, median national rents rose a whopping 12% between August 2020 and August 2021, while rent applications went up as much as 95% in some cities, according to apartment listing platform RentCafe. The average rent is now at $1,633 a month - $169 more than this time last year and nearly $200 more than 2019’s numbers.

Millions of potential first-time homebuyers have been completely priced out of the market by now, and their only alternative is to keep paying inflated prices to live in a home they'll never own. Housing advocates argue that much of the increase in the cost of housing can be attributed to the buying frenzy initiated by those affluent buyers. They have snatched all the affordable homes they could find and frequently started bidding wars to get desirable properties, which pushed home prices to extraordinary levels. According to a new report released by Harvard Housing Studies Center, low-income households have significantly more difficulty reclaiming financial footing, and millions of them are at risk of foreclosure or eviction in the coming weeks and months.

As more and more potential buyers get burned-out, tired of bidding wars, skyrocketing prices, and limited options, they have been left with no other choice rather than renting. However, the rental market is facing its own crisis. Some call it "the rental market apocalypse," referring to the growing imbalances within the market: while millions remain at the brink of eviction, hordes of frustrated buyers who have been forced to give up the competitive housing market are now finding an equally frenzied rental scene - one where soaring rents and shrinking supply are growing concerns.

But with many Americans still struggling to financially recover from the recession, and at least 4 million households at risk of eviction, these cautionary demands may make it even more difficult for people to rent. At the moment, a devastating eviction and foreclosure crisis is fast spreading all across the country. This mounting catastrophe happening right before our eyes is worsening despite the $46 billion allocated in rental and mortgage relief programs by the federal government. These programs are failing to keep people out of the streets given that the application process is extremely bureaucratic and many people only get approved to receive help after it's too late.

According to an updated analysis of U.S. census data by Goldman Sachs, nearly 4 million households still are behind on their rent, and at least 750,000 are expected to be pushed out of their homes by the end of the coming month. Despite the record influx of government funding, states have failed to allocate 89 percent of the billion-dollar rental assistance program, according to the US Treasury Department. That is effectively putting America at the brink of a homelessness crisis of devastating proportions.

“We’ll see a lot of renters out on the streets,” highlighted Michelle Dempsky, a staff attorney for Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania, noting that she has already seen a significant increase in the number of eviction cases she has been assigned since the moratorium was lifted. As Fran Quigley, a housing law professor at the IU McKinney School of Law, points out, the eviction crisis is only a symptom of a larger problem."We’ve taken something that most people agree is a human right - having a safe and secure place to live - and made that available only to people who can afford to pay a price that makes a profit for someone else," Quigley emphasizes.

As the housing and rental markets face worsening crises, a foreclosure and eviction tsunami has begun. Our leaders, who were supposed to assist our people, don't seem to be bothered with the risks of letting millions of people fall into a spiral of systemic poverty and homelessness. Needless to say, this will rapidly evolve into a major national crisis. A few years ago, it would be hard to imagine that the wealthiest country in the world would allow a significant part of its population to be pushed out of their homes. Yet, this is where we are right now. Unfortunately, this catastrophic situation is only a hint of what is coming for us. As our nation gradually collapses into chaos, the worst is yet to come."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Full screen recommended.

Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Beautiful!

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you'd contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera - but a few hours apart. The person in the image - also the astrophotographer - has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above.

Click image for larger size.

The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchi, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was the bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191015.html

Chet Raymo, “The Seeds of Contemplation”

“The Seeds of Contemplation”

by Chet Raymo

“Do a Google search for “Cuthbert” and you’ll get two main hits: a stunning blonde Canadian actress who I never heard of, and the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon monk I was looking for. Make that an image search and poor Saint Cuthbert gets washed away in a sea of unclad sexiness that would probably have rattled the poor abbot/bishop to his core.

Well, we don’t really know, do we? We don’t really know what was on Saint Cuthbert’s mind. Certainly he had an impressive career as a Church administrator, but be seems to have been irresistibly drawn to the life of an anchorite. For a while he was prior at the famous abbey of Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria, then bishop of the same place, but he gave all that up for a solitary cell on the nearby island of Farne. According to tradition, his severe abode had no windows or doors, and no views of scenery or humans. It was circular and open only to the sky. There Cuthbert lived, like a mouse at the bottom of a coffee can.

Was his mouse-eye view of the sky enough to feed his soul? Presumably he didn’t see rainbows, since rainbows don’t appear near the zenith. He was far enough north (56° 37′) not to see the sun at all, even in summer, depending on how wide was the angle of his view of the sky. Only a few bright stars illuminated his night: Capella, Vega, and Deneb (taking into account the 18 degrees of precession since his time). In late summer the Milky Way would have been draped overhead, although- alas- the least bright part of the galaxy. The aurora would have entertained him on occasion, and “shooting stars.”

How much is enough? Thoreau had his pond, and dinner at the Emersons whenever he wanted. Henry Beston had the whole wide sea crashing outside his “outermost” house on Cape Cod. Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek was in a valley, but her patch of sky was supplemented by woods and fields and the always changing theater of the creek itself. Many of us have longed at one time or another for greater simplicity, for a life lived deliberately, for the intensely-experienced few rather than the trivialized many. It’s all a matter of finding the balance, between the harsh parsimony of the anchorite’s cell and the rush and clutter of 21st-century, media-saturated overload.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Our Task..."

“We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as humans is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” D.H. Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.”

- Albert Camus

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/24/21: "ALERT: Be Ready People. Expect A Second LARGER Wave Of Inflation To Hit"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/24/21:

"ALERT: Be Ready People. 

Expect A Second LARGER Wave Of Inflation To Hit"

- https://traderschoice.net/

The Daily "Near You?"

Tofino, British Columbia, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Last Time Always Happens Now"

"The Last Time Always Happens Now"

by David Cain

"William Irvine, an author and philosophy professor I’m a big fan of, often tries to point people towards a little-discussed fact of human life: "You always know when you’re doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you’re doing something for the last time."

There was, or will be, a last time for everything you do, from climbing a tree to changing a diaper, and living with a practiced awareness of that fact can make even the most routine day feel like it’s bursting with blessings. Of all the lasting takeaways from my periodic dives into Stoicism, this is the one that has enhanced my life the most. I’ve touched on it before in my Stoicism experiment log and in a Patreon post, and I intend to write about it many more times in the future (but who can say?)

To explain why someone might want to start thinking seriously about last times, Bill Irvine asks us to imagine a rare but relatable event: going to your favorite restaurant one last time, knowing it’s about to close up for good.

Predictably, dining on this last-ever night makes for a much richer experience than almost all the other times you’ve eaten at that restaurant, but it’s not because the food, decor, or service is any different than usual. It’s better because you know it’s the last time, so you’re apt to savor everything you can about it, right down to the worn menus and tacky napkin rings. You’re unlikely to let any mistakes or imperfections bother you, and in fact you might find them endearing.

It becomes clearer than ever, in other words, how great it was while it lasted, and how little the petty stuff mattered. On that last dinner, you can set aside minor issues with ease, and appreciate even the most mundane details. Anything else would seem foolish, because you’re here now, and this is it. It might even occur to you that there’s no reason you couldn’t have enjoyed it this much every time you dined here – except that all the other times, you knew there would be more times, so you didn’t have to be so intentional about appreciating it.

That’s an exceptionally rare situation though. Almost always, we do things for the last time without knowing it’s the last time. There was a last time – on an actual calendar date – when you drew a picture with crayons purely for your own pleasure. A last time you excitedly popped a Blockbuster rental into your VCR. A last time you played fetch with a certain dog. Whenever the last time happened, it was “now” at the time.

You’ve certainly heard the heart-wrenching insight that there’s always a last time a parent picks up their child. By a certain age the child is too big, which means there’s always an ordinary day when the parent picks up and puts down their child as they have a thousand times before, with no awareness that it was the last time they would do it.

Ultimately there will be as many last times as there were first times. There will be last time you do laundry. A last time you eat pie. A last time you visit a favorite neighborhood, city, or country. For every single friend you’ve ever had, there will be a last time you talk, or maybe there already has been.

For ninety-nine percent of these last times, you will have no idea that that’s what it is. It will seem like another of the many middle times, with a lot more to come. If you knew it was the last-ever time you spoke to a certain person or did a certain activity, you’d probably make a point of appreciating it, like a planned last visit to Salvatore’s Pizzeria. You wouldn’t spend it thinking about something else, or let minor annoyances spoil it.

Many last times are still a long way in the future, of course. The trouble is you don’t know which ones. The solution, Irvine suggests, is to frequently imagine that this is the last time, even when it’s probably not. A few times a day, whatever you’re doing, you assume you’re doing that thing for the last time. There will be a last time you sip coffee, like you’re doing now. What if this sip was it? There will be a last time you walk into the office and say hi to Sally. If this was it, you might be a little more genuine, a little more present.

The point isn’t to make life into a series of desperate goodbyes. You can go ahead and do the thing more or less normally. You might find, though, that when you frame it as a potential last time, you pay more attention to it, and you appreciate it for what it is in a way you normally don’t. It turns out that ordinary days are full of experiences you expect will keep happening forever, and of course none of them will.

It doesn’t matter if the activity is something you particularly love doing. Walking into a 7-11 or weeding the garden is just as worthy of last-time practice as hugging a loved one. Even stapling the corner of some pages together can generate a sense of appreciation, if you saw it as your final act of stapling in a life that’s contained a surprising amount of stapling.

Irvine uses mowing the lawn as an example, a task he doesn’t love doing. If you imagine that this is the last time you’ll mow the lawn, rather than consider it a good riddance, you might realize that there will be a time when you’ve mown your last lawn, and that there were a lot of great things about living in your lawn-mowing, bungalow-maintaining heyday. A few seconds later, it dawns on you that you still are.

You can get very specific with the experiences you do this with. The last time you roll cookie dough between your palms. The last time you get rained on. The last time you sidestep down a crowded cinema aisle. The last time your jeans smell like campfire smoke. The last time your daughter says “swannich” instead of “sandwich.” Virtually everything is a worthy candidate for this reflection.

It always brings perspective to your life as it is now, and it never gets old. It’s an immensely rewarding exercise, but it not a laborious one. It takes only two or three seconds - allowing yourself “a flickering thought,” as Irvine put it - to notice what you’re doing right now, and consider the possibility that this is indeed the last escalator ride at Fairfield Mall, the last time you put on a Beatles record, the last time you encounter a squirrel, or the last time you parallel park in front of Aunt Rita’s building."

- https://www.raptitude.com/

○

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"

"What I Have Learned So Far"

"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world? Because, properly

attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone."

~ Mary Oliver

"And Never, Never To Forget..."

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

- Arundhati Roy

"When Anything Goes, Everything Goes"

"When Anything Goes, Everything Goes"

by Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "What we’ve been looking at this week is “how the world ends.” And today, we meet a woman who intends to kill it – the exterminating angel herself – Saule Omarova. Born in Kazakhstan, educated in Moscow, Madison, and Chicago, and now nominated by the Biden Team to head up its OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). Ms. Omarova makes no effort to disguise what she is up to. She says she aims to “effectively ‘end banking’ as we know it.” That is, she wants to replace an entire industry – one that evolved over hundreds of years, thanks to the efforts of thousands of innovating, competing bankers… who served millions of willing customers – with some monster of her own invention.

Redesigning Finance: But destroying “banking” is just the beginning of her ambitions. She has never worked for a bank, never run a business… never satisfied a customer, started a company, or “made payroll” for one…and never even held a job outside of academia or the law (we’re not counting her time as “special adviser” for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance in 2006-2007 as a real job). And yet, she thinks she knows what is best for you, and 330 million other Americans (and perhaps the whole world)… and intends to give it to us, whether we want it or not. She explains:

"My new working paper […] advocates a comprehensive reform of the structure and systemic function of the Fed’s balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. It offers a blueprint for transforming the Fed’s balance sheet into what it calls the People’s Ledger: the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating sovereign credit and money in a democratic economy."

Holy moly. She thinks modern finance was “designed”… and that she has the right to redesign it, allocating money as she sees fit. Yes, she proposes to be the decider, not just for the government, but for the private sector, too.

In particular, she proposes setting up something similar to the Gosplan in the Soviet Union, a “National Investment Authority,” (NIA) that would be responsible for “formulating, financing, and executing a coordinated strategy of sustainable and socially inclusive economic development.” In other words, the feds have made such wonderful investments these many years… let’s give them more money to invest!

Soviet-Era Import: But wait, there’s more… "The NIA “would act directly in financial markets as a lender, guarantor, securitizer, and venture capitalist with a broad mandate to mobilize, amplify, and direct public and private capital to where it’s needed most.”

Yes, she’s proposing a Gosbank, the Soviet Union’s central bank, too. And why not? Central planning worked so well in the Soviet Union. How nice of Ms. Omarova to bring it with her – to America. And now, like kudzu or the spotted lanternfly, it’s taking over. How’s that for the End of the World As We Have Known It?

Anything Goes: Of course, the world itself is not really ending. So what if inflation goes to 3% or 5%… or 10%, for that matter? So what if the feds waste a few trillion dollars more? And who cares if another moron goes to Washington?

We Diary readers are mostly older and mostly white; we have our savings, our stocks, our pensions, our insurance policies… and even Social Security to support us. And our houses are much more valuable than they used to be. So we won’t be too hurt in the next crisis, will we?

Besides, we’ve already been through three crises so far this century… What's another one, more or less? And yet, here we are… on the other side of the Rubicon. The fundamental principles that guided the American Republic – the rules and institutions we grew up with – are being chucked in the river.

Now, it’s “anything goes.” And when anything goes… everything goes with it. The next major selloff will probably give Ms. Omarova the crisis she is looking for. And it may not be far off. The Chinese are facing a 1929-style debt crisis. The U.S. is up against its own debt ceiling; if it isn’t raised, experts say the results will be “catastrophic.” There will be panic and hysteria. Then, the OCC chief – and other elite world-improvers who created the problem – will tell us how capitalism and free markets have failed…and roll out their cockamamie solution.

Gates of Hell: Let’s look at how it might play out. Inflationary increases of 3%… or 5%… won’t mean much – in themselves. But house prices are already rising at 18% year-on-year. Producer prices are up at an annual 8% rate. And now that inflation is out of the bag, it will be impossible to stuff it back in. In the next crisis, this inflation will add a critical new dimension to the Federal Reserve’s problems. That is, as in the last three crises of this century, the Fed will come riding to the rescue. It will “print” more money and try to boost stock prices – just as it did in 2001, 2009, and 2020.

But in none of those cases was inflation a problem, too. And when investors see the Fed supporting the economy with more money – as it must – it will be obvious that the Fed is trapped. Inflate or die. The Fed will inflate… and let the dollar (and bonds) die.

Obituaries for the bond market will appear in every financial publication. An even greater panic will take hold. Different political factions will clash in the streets. And the masses will turn their tired eyes to Washington, pleading… “Help us… Save us… Touch us… Heal us.”

And then, like Vladimir Lenin arriving in Petrograd in 1917… or Fidel Castro washing up on the shores near Niquero, Cuba, in 1956, Ms. Omarova’s hour will come around at last. And guided by crackpots and grifters… the U.S. will step gingerly through the gates of Hell, like so many nations before it. More to come…"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Decide..."

“We're all going to die. We don't get much say over how or when, but we do get to decide how we're gonna live. So, do it. Decide. Is this the life you want to live? Is this the person you want to love? Is this the best you can be? Can you be stronger? Kinder? More Compassionate? Decide. Breathe in. Breathe out and decide.”

- “Richard”, “Grey’s Anatomy”

"Fiscal Cliffs will Impact the Markets - This is the Time to Play It Safe"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, AM 9/24/21:

"Fiscal Cliffs will Impact the Markets - 

This is the Time to Play It Safe"

"There are so many fiscal cliffs that are out there. Some have ended and some end soon. The next one is Mortgage Forbearance. It ends September 30th, 2021. People need to realize this is going to affect so much of our financial system as well as the real estate markets."

"Biden Breaking Bad"

"Biden Breaking Bad"

by Jim Kunstler

"Time, the saying goes, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. So now, maybe, we’re at the event-horizon where nature is suspended, because everything seems to be happening at once. The weeks ahead will determine whether we are a coherent society that can function on the basis of a firm consensual reality, or just a convocation of battling narratives designed to conceal anything that quacks like truth, all veering toward failure.

Up this afternoon (Friday) for instance: the results of the Maricopa, AZ, election audit. The New York Times has declared a preliminary draft of the audit “a cap-gun ending to an inquiry whose backers hinted would turn up a cannonade of fraud.” Their conclusion: “Joe Biden” won the 2020 election fair-and-square. That would be momentous if it were true, but is it? Or is it just the juke of a player that typically runs zig-zags through the facts? The Times certainly has an interest in, shall we say, getting ahead of the story in its never-ending quest to control the narrative - as opposed to delivering actual news fit to print. I’m standing by to sort out the jokers from the face-cards.

Otherwise, it’s been a less than stellar month for the putative winner of that 2020 contest, the media figment known as “Joe Biden.” His open border policy flipped savagely on him as a nine-month influx of Central and South Americans (and opportunists from even more distant lands) turned into the bad optics of some 15,000 Haitians (most up from living in Chile, Columbia and other non-Haitian places) flooded the zone at Del Rio, Texas. Predictably, their insta-town under the border bridge turned septic when the few Port-a-Johns dropped off there boiled over - instant Haiti! - and the appalling situation could no longer be hidden from the news media.

Federal border agents next tried policing the scene on horseback — arguably a daintier approach than driving SUVs through the mob - and the news media instantly parlayed the scene of horseman using the reins to control their mounts into a narrative about slaves getting whipped in the cottonfields. In other words, another chapter in the testament of “systemic racism.” Even the notorious race hustler Al Sharpton drifted down to Del Rio to sprinkle a little gasoline on a potential fire, but his audience heckled him into submission and the operation fizzled.

Meanwhile, “Joe Biden” cranked up a cosmetic airlift sending a few Haitians back to Haiti - which they had fled from years ago to live in South America - at the same time shuttling another cohort of Haitians over to Houston and other cities around the USA, as if nobody will ever catch on to the shell game being played. Any way you cut it, the fiasco on the US / Mexican border had turned into a big loss for the Big Guy since the economic alarm bells ringing across the country tell you the last thing we need is more illegal immigrants to compete with actual citizens for a declining number of low-paying jobs.

The Big Guy also had a bad week on the family grift front as the story broke, first on Politico and then elsewhere like a brushfire, that the trove of incriminating memoranda on Hunter Biden’s laptop was for-real, and that the concerted effort to hide all that muck from the voters during last year’s election campaign was a completely dishonest operation. Add up all the memos and emails on Hunter’s hard-drive and you have a pretty clear digital trail of a major racketeering operation that can no longer be denied. So, will Merrick Garland’s DOJ keep ignoring it?

The Attorney General was probably forced to approve John Durham’s recent indictment of Hillary Clinton errand-boy, lawyer Michael Sussman, from the DC Lawfare Central outfit called Perkins Coie. I say forced because it was an open-and-shut case, and denial by Mr. Garland would have been seen as just another RussiaGate ploy by an agency hopelessly tainted by years of official criminal misconduct - and let’s assume that Mr. AG Garland does not want to be dragged into that mess, especially as Mr. Durham is unraveling it. And the Special Counsel signaled that he is doing just that by implicating a wheel of culpable public figures in a 27-page indictment for Mr. Sussman’s simple crime of lying to the FBI, which could have been accomplished in two concise paragraphs. That is, expect the Sussman indictment to not be the end of a matter that could be tending toward a massive RICO indictment against the entire DNC wax museum of liars and seditionists.

Coincidently - and on rather a separate track - we have China’s latest export to the advanced economies of the world: the meltdown of its bond market as signified in the wreck of super-gigantic real estate conglomerate Evergrande. Behold the broken daisy-chain of obligations stretching to the furthest reaches of global finance and the deleterious effect of that on capital markets everywhere to follow. The central banks are pulling out the last stops now to prevent a general meltdown of hallucinated “wealth” around the world and you can probably measure the success of that last-ditch effort in days as we enter the cursed month of October, when skeletons dance on the graves of lost fortunes. The stage-managers behind “Joe Biden” look forward to that as they would to so many stakes driven through their degenerate hearts.

Speaking of hearts, there is the current heart-of-the-matter, the Covid-19 engineered bioweapon being used internationally to suppress formerly free citizens of formerly democratic republics. It becomes more obvious each day that everything connected to this extravaganza is other than it appears to be. Chiefly, the vaccine is not a vaccine and it will probably end up killing more people than the Covid-19 disease and its variants. A lot of those deaths will be caused in the months ahead by damage to people’s hearts and other organs from spike proteins generated via mRNA shots. The reported official numbers are all lies of one kind or another, issued by agencies primarily concerned not with public health but with covering asses at the highest level, so do not trust them. If you haven’t had a vax shot, better seriously consider steering clear of your government’s desperate attempts to get the job done.

Events are converging. Everything is happening at once. Narratives are in collapse. Governments may soon commence to fall. Food and critical supplies of parts for things needed to run advanced societies are up next. What will you decide to do about yourself, your community, and your country?"

- https://kunstler.com/

Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/24/21: "X-Factor Explained; Very Important Updates"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/24/21:

"X-Factor Explained; Very Important Updates"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"How It Really Is"

 

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up for 9/24/21"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up for 9/24/21"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Superstar rap singer Nicki Minaj has escaped the Democrat thought plantation. Minaj posted some true negative information about side effects from the CV19 vaccines to her millions of fans on social media last week. The fire storm from globalist Marxist Democrats burned red hot. Minaj alleged her family was threatened, and the White House wanted to call her to give her proper information (talking points) about vax side effects. Minaj declined and was not happy. The mainstream media (MSM) also joined in on the reeducation of Minaj, which exposes the MSM, once again, as pure propaganda and not journalism. Minaj is not backing down to what she calls “bullies”! There is lots of new scientific information out this week that shows the dangers of the so-called vaccines, but it’s all “misinformation” to the propaganda machine that wants you jabbed no matter what.

Adam Schiff and his Democrat colleagues have introduced legislation to limit the powers and protections of the President of the United States of America. What??? Isn’t a Democrat going to be in the White House for the next 3 years? What’s going on? Do Democrats think there is a chance that Trump will be reinstated? I think they do. After all, the Dems know full well they cheated to win the White House, Senate and House. Of course, more and more cheating is exposed every week, and the results of the Arizona audit are coming out soon. Meanwhile, states like Texas are announcing new forensic audits of the 2020 Election in the Lone Star State.

Looks like the federal government will not shut down as Speaker Pelosi has announced a Continuing Resolution that will keep the government running and paying its bills. Another crisis has been averted, but the spending crisis and debt crisis is going on unabated. Will the Fed finally taper all the easy money, or will another financial crisis force them to print bigger mountains of money to keep it all afloat? I predict we are going to see by the end of this year."

- https://usawatchdog.com/

"Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these

 stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 9.24.21."

- https://rumble.com/

"Charles Hugh Smith: Fed Assuring 80% To 90% Collapse Of Bubble"

Full screen recommended.

"Charles Hugh Smith: 

Fed Assuring 80% To 90% Collapse Of Bubble"

by Paul “Half Dollar” Eberhart

"From a revival of the inflation-deflation debate to the imminent collapse of the global banking system, there is no shortage of market & economic news, and noise, although there does seem to be a shortage of high quality thought about what’s really going on. So let’s get our bearings and try to think correctly about all of the unfolding dynamics, so that we do not fall victim to them. And to help us understand what’s happening in the markets and the economy, today, September 23, 2021, Half Dollar sat down with Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds for a robust discussion on some important topics.

Topics in today’s discussion include:

• How has the US dollar not already hyperinflated?

• What are the distortions versus the reality when it comes to consumer price inflation?

• What are we to make of the the supply chain disruptions in general and the microchip shortage specifically?

• People are opting out?

• Are we facing the imminent collapse of the global banking system?

For robust discussion around all of those topics and a whole lot more, tune-in to the interview in its entirety."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Morgan Stanley: A Destructive Stock Market Crash Is On The Horizon"

Full screen recommended.

"Morgan Stanley: 

A Destructive Stock Market Crash Is On The Horizon"

by Epic Economist

"It's September, and stock markets around the world are starting to panic about an imminent global financial meltdown. It's been 18 months since the onset of the health crisis and the latest stock market collapse. From that point on, stocks went on an unprecedented rally, but those extraordinary gains weren't supported by real economic growth.

For experienced investors, who have seen the events that led to previous crashes, it has become evident that this monstrous stock market bubble cannot be sustained for much longer. When they look at the markets, they can see a bubble of everything. Or as GMO fund manager and legendary investor Jeremy Grantham, puts it, there's “an epic bubble” about to burst. As the market veteran explained, “extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior” have all contributed to the uncontrolled growth of this bubble.

Over the past eight months, the S&P went up by 20.6%, the highest growth on record. But that's extremely concerning considering that this splendid rally happened just as the U.S. economy fell deep into recession. At this point, U.S. stock, bond, and housing markets are simply defying financial gravity. The more the bubble expands, the bigger are the risks. The tech bubble and the cryptocurrency bubble are simply off the charts. And they keep on rising as if a day of reckoning would never come. But things are about to change.

Traders are running increasingly more scared since the Evergrande default contagion is threatening to spark widespread bankruptcies. That could lead to losses to the tune of hundreds of billions. Already, Hong Kong stocks plummeted to the lowest level in nearly a decade. The Chinese government is struggling to come up with critical support before the whole thing collapses. But some market watchers are warning that the initial default was enough to unleash a cascade of systemic failures on the global markets.

Most recently, legendary investor Jim Rogers made the headlines as he warned about growing risks and a looming collapse in the market. Rogers has seen more market ups and downs than most people alive today. During an international forum hosted by Russia, he revealed to be more concerned about the market’s future prospects than he’s ever been before. He says that there's simply too much debt, while inflation is getting out of hand, the dollar is being debased as central banks continue to intervene in the markets, speculation is at all-time highs, and geopolitical tensions are further stressing the near-term outlook. The current macroeconomic environment doesn't look good at all.

That's why he confidently predicts that we will witness a massive economic and financial meltdown that will unleash the biggest bear market of our lifetime. The investor argues that the collapse has started and it will soon cascade its way towards the US, eventually sinking the entire system into a deep recession, if not a downright Depression. “I caution all of you, it’s been 11 years since we’ve had a serious bear market, and I would suggest to you that next time when we have a serious bear market it’s going to be the worst in our lifetime,” he said.

Rogers pointed out that the huge debt piled up by policymakers to paper over every crack in the economy or market is losing its effect. "Eventually, the market is going to say: ‘We don't want this, we don’t want to play this game anymore, and we don’t want your garbage paper anymore’," he said referring to the Fed's Quantitative Easing program. “And that’s when we will have very serious problems... We all are going to pay a horrible price," he added. Bearing in mind that the Everything Bubble has been expanded on the back of near-zero economic growth, valuations simply cannot stay at record highs even with more easy money, since the growth rate for liquidity already peaked in the first quarter.

Markets don’t need an exotic reason to crash - a simple change of sentiment could do it. And that change already started in Chinese markets. Despite comparisons that the Evergrande default crisis may be China's Lehman moment, given today's fundamentals, stocks don’t need a “Lehman Event” to crash. They're priced for perfection, and the global economy is far from perfect right now. A domino fall has begun, and for the first time in 18 months, policymakers will not be injecting more stimulus into the economy. That is to say, all the major tailwinds that created the bubble of everything have started slowing or reversing. The only catalyst the stock market bubble needs to pop now is time."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​